27. Astra
Astra
By the time they let me see Delphine, the story of Kieran’s recovery had reached her wing ahead of me.
A steward unlocked her door and remained outside it. He left the door open a hand’s width, enough to hear if either of us raised our voices.
Delphine was sitting against the wall with the blanket folded across her lap. More color had returned to her face since I found her in the sealed room, though the broken line at her wrist remained dark and jagged. The skin around it had the pale, thin look of an old scar.
She waited until I sat beside her.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“What did you hear?”
“That Kieran stopped breathing and you repaired his Mark with your hands.”
“He’s alive. His Mark is whole.”
“And the bond?”
I turned my wrist so she could see the completed green-gold line.
Delphine studied it without touching. “Everyone knows something happened. The stewards have become very careful about not discussing it.”
“That usually means they’ve been told not to.”
“It also makes them terrible liars.”
Her mouth almost curved. For a moment I saw the girl who had shared bread with me at Zenith Hall and told me where not to stand during inspections.
Then her attention returned to my wrist.
“What did you do?”
I told her what I could. The cold beneath Kieran’s skin. The break in the Mark. The unfinished line reaching him where my hands could not. I left out nothing about the choice he had made, or the way the completed bond had carried the strain when his own Mark began to fail.
“So the bond saved him.” Her gaze dropped to my wrist. “And Hale’s line is still open?”
I looked down at it. “Yes.”
Delphine uncovered her wrist.
The fracture began near the base of her thumb and crossed two dark channels before disappearing beneath her sleeve. I had seen it through the glass and later beneath the silver light of her room, but never this close. The edges were too even in places, almost scored.
No line joined Delphine to me.
“You think someone did this to you,” I said.
“I know they did.”
“Do you remember it?”
“Pieces. The review chamber. Straps at my wrists. A reader telling me to stop fighting.” Her fingers curled into the blanket. “Then I woke here, and this was all they left me.”
Anger heated my skin, and the lines at my wrist darkened with it.
Delphine saw them change.
“I want you to touch it,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“But you reached Kieran before his bond closed.”
“Because a line already joined us. There isn’t one between you and me.”
“And if you bond with Hale?”
“The Council thinks that once all three bonds are complete, I may be able to reach anyone’s Mark.”
Delphine lowered her voice when the steward shifted beyond the door. “Then, if it happens, I want you to consider trying.”
She drew her wrist back and covered it with her other palm. “I don’t expect you to choose a bond for my sake.”
The restraint made the request harder to dismiss.
“They took me through the west door because my Mark was fading,” she said. “At the Hall, I thought the worst thing they could do was let it disappear. I was wrong. They kept it alive long enough to break it and never told me why.”
I remembered Delphine standing beside that door, trying not to show how frightened she was. I had watched them take her and believed, for too long, that whatever happened afterward had ended quickly.
“I don’t know what I’d be reaching into,” I said.
“I wake up with it every day.” Her voice remained quiet. “My hand doesn’t close properly, and part of my life is missing. I know what doing nothing costs.”
She uncovered the fracture again. “I know it won’t be safe. I still want the choice.”
I had spent my first weeks at Zenith Hall being told that choice and safety were the same thing, provided someone else chose for me. Delphine had been living with the result longer than I had known the Hall existed.
“I’m not going to ask Hale for a bond because of this,” I said.
“I know.”
“If Hale and I choose to bond, I’ll come back. If the records are right, I’ll examine the fracture. I won’t promise I can heal it, and either of us can stop.”
She held my gaze for a moment, then nodded.
“Until then, Kieran can tell me what he felt from the other side,” I said. “I also need your records. I want to know whether the fracture has changed since you arrived.”
“Marrow already knows you’ve been in the archive.”
“He knows I was looking for you. He doesn’t know everything I found.”
Delphine considered that. “Just don’t forget me in here while you’re being careful.”
“I won’t.”
This time she smiled, brief and tired.
“I believe you,” she said.
The steward moved outside the door. His sleeve brushed the stone, followed by the soft click of a watch being opened.
“Before you go,” Delphine said, “tell me what it felt like.”
“Kieran’s Mark?”
She nodded.
I looked down at my hands. “Cold at the break. The channels on one side still carried warmth, but nothing crossed to the other. When I pressed against it, I could feel him beyond it.”
“Him, or the Mark?”
“Both. I couldn’t separate them.”
“And when the bond formed?”
“I felt the strain move into the line between us. After that, the break began to close.”
Delphine looked at her covered wrist.
“Mine has been broken for months,” she said. “Somehow, it’s still holding.”
The steward cleared his throat.
I stood, but Delphine caught my fingers before I could move away.
“Ask me again when it’s possible,” she said.
“I will.”
“Good.”
Her grip loosened.
I left with the shape of the fracture fixed in my mind: the channels cut too cleanly, the darkness held in place beneath her skin, and the question of what had been done to keep it there.